


dear desolation.

by thepapernautilus



Category: Final Fantasy XIV
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Angst with a Happy Ending, Blood and Gore, Body Horror, Catharsis Ending, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Death, Depression, Emetophobia, F/M, Graphic Description of Corpses, Hallucinations, It Gets Worse Before It Gets Better, Mental Health Issues, Mind Rape, Mindfuck, Nightmares, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Psychological Horror, Psychological Trauma, Rated For Violence, Survivor Guilt, Torture, Whump, baby writes her first dead dove, break the catboy, but it does get better, graphic description of lightwarden wol eating someone, op cannot write a sad ending, there is no sexual content in here whatsoever
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-20
Updated: 2020-11-20
Packaged: 2021-03-10 04:49:23
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,428
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27627736
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thepapernautilus/pseuds/thepapernautilus
Summary: She took up a strange occupancy in his mind, the grotesqueness of her appearance shifting depending on what would cause the most torment, his mind’s eye a razor designed to exact the most pain.When he grew numb to one depravity, his mind would conjure another.In which the worst demons lie within one's psyche, and Raha cannot outrun them, in the First or in the Source.
Relationships: G'raha Tia | Crystal Exarch/Warrior of Light
Comments: 15
Kudos: 71





	dear desolation.

**Author's Note:**

> **Please review the tags before continuing.** This is not my typical FFXIV work, and this fic contains explicit violence, gore, disturbing imagery, and explicit depictions of death, PTSD, and depression. **There is no sexual content whatsoever.** The explicit rating is due to the violence. While it ends on a positive note, this is a bit of a Dead Dove sort of deal and goes into some dark places.

A moon after he woke into the world of the Eighth Umbral Era, Raha bore witness to what it meant to die at the hands of Black Rose.

To speak even the name felt a bad omen, as if invoking the spectre of death itself. If the gods had abandoned them, new ones took up their space, spirits to haunt them and their work. They called themselves _hunger, murder, desolation._ Biggs told him only what he needed to know—Black Rose killed millions, the Warrior and her companions died by it, everyone Raha had ever _known_ died from it—but left the details sparse and terse, as if recalling forbidden knowledge to a neophyte.

Such answers did not satisfy him. They never had. Intellectual though he was, there were things he could not fully comprehend until he saw them for himself. Such was why historical anthropology held such a powerful draw for Raha. There was little reward greater than creating hypotheses on the inner workings of an ancient society and uncovering tangible, long-buried evidence proving him in the right. Or better yet, overturning his theories entirely, leaving him wondering in awe at the smallest pieces of forgotten technology.

No, mere explanations would not satisfy him. In order to understand the devastation Black Rose wrought upon Eorzea, Raha would have to see it for himself.

Their research into the inner-workings of the Tower took them into the Dravanian Hinterlands. The Thaliak River had swelled to bursting, flooding the plains with several yalms of brackish water, nature overtaking the long-abandoned hallowed places of Sharlayan knowledge. In one of the marginalia of Nero’s journals, the Garlean noted of a certain Master Matoya and her dragon’s hoard of knowledge. Armed with a water-breathing charm and battered gasmasks (“Just in case,” Biggs had gruffed,) Raha and a young Ironworks volunteer—Iseux, a gangly Elezen with sharp eyes and a bright laugh—plunged the depths of the Thaliak River, and dove into Master Matoya’s cave.

When the first chamber proved fruitless, nothing but a few waterlogged cooking books and the overwhelming stench of dead sea-life, Iseux found a trapdoor, tugged it open, and shoved his head inside. He did it with a laugh, fearless of whatever benign bats or ghosts haunted the cavern.

When Iseux’s body went rigid, Raha slammed his gas mask over his head, shoving his face frantically into it, _praying_ for a seal, nose smashed against the glass. He held his breath til his lungs seized for air, heart staccato in his chest, dizzy and panicked.

Iseux slumped to the floor, prone and jerking. He resembled a fly smashed by a book, twitching in agony, wretched and broken. Bloodstained foam seeped between his clenched teeth, eyes wide, bloodshot, bulging, and sightless. He wheezed in desperate, spluttering breaths, choking to death on his own blood and bile. Everywhere on his tawny skin abrasions erupted, bloodsoaked bruises from an unseen entity.

Raha did not move, for fear of breaking the fragile seal on his mask. With both hands crammed against the glass of his mask, he was forced to watch in abject horror. _It should have been me,_ a wild, desperate thought overtook him, cyclical, insidious.

He had never watched a man die before, and if he had thought himself brave in the face of the indignities of death, he was sorely mistaken.

He did not move until Iseux’s body stilled. And then he did not _stop moving_ until he reached Ironworks’ makeshift encampment, unable to articulate to Biggs what happened to Iseux. But Biggs took one look at him and knew, his face falling in unsurprised disappointment, the sorrow of a man all-too used to sudden loss.

He learned later what Black Rose truly did. Stilled the very aether of one’s body to a standstill. Utter and complete aetherial stasis. The connection between aether, soul, and body was one meticulously studied by Sharlayan scholars, but far too little was known on what absolute deprivation, utter aetherial stagnation would do to a body.

Raha witnessed it firsthand. Three generations of descendants had become the misbegotten prophets to these horrors, and fewer still had lived to tell the tale.

When he slept—times which grew briefer still each night—he dreamed of Black Rose.

And he dreamed of the Warrior of Light.

That night he dreamed he stumbled upon her mangled body post-mortem, desiccated and decomposing. The flesh eaten away by maggots and vermin, exposing the blackened branches of her clavicle, her sternum, the treasure of her heart burning white-hot beneath her ribs, unquenchable even beyond the grave. Her mouth frozen in a grotesque rendition of the same smile she left him with when he turned from her to lock himself away, resigning himself to the uncertain future of the ancients’ last wish.

He fell to his knees before her corpse.

In reverence or terror, he knew not.

Another time he dreamed she slept in his arms, tucked safely beneath his chin, her warm breath ghosting across his bare chest. Lovely, vibrant, _alive._ He tucked her hair away from her face, kissed her forehead and remembered for the briefest of moments what it felt like to love and _be_ loved.

And in a moment’s notice, she was dying.

Clawing at his skin, her body contorting as she retched blood—blood the scarlet of Allagan eyes, _his_ eyes—whimpering, pleading, _screaming._ She writhed, possessed, the smallest iota of her being ripped asunder in a haze of pain. Raha laid beside her, paralyzed and helpless once more as he watched her slowly die.

Her dying—a consecutive, progressive act, lived again and again and _again_ each night—stayed only in his dreams, but it was a permanent fact of his life, a theory tested into law. She had died an ignoble, unfair death; and as her last prophet, the only one living who had seen the blinding, glorious blaze of her, he would leap between time to rectify it. Raha walked in the ghost of a world long dead, the graveyard of her life’s work. She was not here, and thus he did not belong. It was all too easy justifying leaving this world for another.

If he thought crossing time and space itself would exorcise him of her ghost, he was naïve and foolish.

She arrived later. It took her two years to catch up with him, time enough to build the scraps of a village which would become the Crystarium. Time enough to figure out when and where he was in time, time enough to barter his soul with the Tower in exchange for hers.

He gave the Tower everything, but most of all, he gave it the time he would have slept. If he never closed his eyes again, it would be too soon. Behind his closed lids, the Warrior died a hundred terrible, unfair deaths, and he was helpless to save her at every turn. If that was all sleep held for him, he would go without.

But a week after he stopped sleeping, he saw her again.

He had glanced up from a tome—a dense Allagan architectural text written in an archaic subscript, taking him twice as long to read and internalize the information—and then, as if she had always been, she was _there._ Seated in the makeshift wooden chair across from his desk, arms crossed, head cocked.

She was dead, and watching him with a smile.

Hair falling out in dull, knotted hanks, the inner-workings of her mouth exposed through a gash in her hollowed cheek. Eyes bloated and listless, the armor hanging off her skeletal frame, and the _blood…_ there was so much of it, too much for one body to hold, pouring from her mouth as she spoke, splattering over his papers as she enunciated the syllables of his name. _“Raha,”_ she murmured to him, amused. She spoke to a child who had run away from their mother. _“So this is where you went.”_

He threw himself backward, falling out of his chair in an ungraceful ruffle of scarlet robes with a undignified yelp. By the time he scrambled to his feet, she was gone, only the sickly sweet stench of death there to remind him that she would not leave him.

As surely as he had abandoned her in the Syrcus Trench _,_ she would not abandon him now.

She took up a strange occupancy in his mind, the grotesqueness of her appearance shifting depending on what would cause the most torment, his mind’s eye a razor designed to exact the most pain. When he grew numb to one depravity, his mind would conjure another. Often she took the form of Sin Eaters, her pale, distended face watching him with disinterest. He saw her in every corpse, every lump of bloody flesh drained of aether. His morbid guardian angel, tracking his every movement with those lifeless, dull eyes.

He was picking his way through the fields of Il Mheg, the flowers erupting into springtime fireworks all around him. And then, as if all the air was sucked out of the atmosphere, the Warrior was beside him once more. She was naked save for the rivulets of gold across her carven body, profane in her beauty, lurid in her horror. She cradled herself in her wings, indifferent and holy. _“What is one man against the tides of fate, Raha?”_ she asked him in low, bubbling croaks. _“How much longer until you give in? How much longer must I wait? How much longer?”_

“As long as it takes,” he promised her under his breath, willing the apparition to the edges of his mind. Titania awaited.

“As long as it takes.”

* * *

He thought seeing her, corporeal, whole, _alive,_ would lessen the visions. His mind created her to substitute the gaping emptiness she had left in her death, and it chose that which would hurt him the most, spur him into action through blind grief and fear. When she arrived, when he saw that she would live, that he would indeed succeed in _saving her_ , surely the visions would quit, move on to new territory.

Instead, they merely bled into reality.

Inextricable. Nonsensical.

And infinitely more horrifying.

The Crystal Exarch was no stranger to death. Just as it was an immutable fact of the Eighth Umbral Era, so too was it in the First. When Vauthry attacked, goaded to righteous fury by the Exarch’s impudence, he felt strangely empty as the mangled bodies came in, only a dull sense of pity as soldier after soldier was declared corrupted and given a hearty dose of poison hidden in a meal or injection. 

The soldiers took their euthanasia without complaint. It was a known fact of life, and better to die in the cradle of the Crystarium than be turned into an unwitting, mindless murderer.  And though she hailed from an Astral Era, he knew the Warrior had borne witness to much and more bloodshed. 

As she wavered on her feet in the Ocular, he knew she would not fall.

“We have some time before the others arrive,” she murmured. Though she knew him not save for the Exarch’s cowl, her voice was unfailingly kind as she took a careful step closer to him. Her hair was plastered to her face from the rain, armor caked in swaths of mud and gore, splendid in her disarray. “… if you’d like to talk?” 

What he wouldn’t give to allow himself to fall into those strong arms. To surrender to vulnerability and submit to the tears so near the surface these days. Would she feel just as warm in his arms as he had dreamed? Would that moment of solace heal the fractured shards of his soul, push away the haze of guilt and apparitions? 

“And if I were to confess any doubts I might harbor,” the Exarch whispered, “no one need ever know?” 

He could tell her now. Tell her how he missed her, tell her how he saw her decaying corpse everywhere like a morbid childhood friend. Rip back his hood and tug her into his arms, feel the warmth of her breath, press his ear to her ribcage and know her heart was there, safe, beating its cacophony of a defiant rhythm.

And then, the visions return—as they ever did.

How foolish of him, to think he had willed them away with sentimentality. 

It happened in an instant. One moment she was alive and whole, and then…

She was decapitated from the waist down, her intestines a serpentine, twisted mess on the marble floors. Her blood spilled in fat, wet drops, and she seemed entirely disinterested in her state, fixing him with a steady, unwavering gaze. How did her body remain suspended? How could she not see? How—

“Exarch?” She asked him, tilting her head. A wet squelch—an organ fell to the floor like a limp, dead creature, he cannot look, he _must_ not look, she _cannot_ know—

He took a slow breath. Prayed he wouldn’t catch the alkaline stench of her blood. Nausea crept up his throat, a cold sweat breaking over his skin. If he moved, she would know, and he could not summon an excuse in this moment that would sufficiently hide his terror. How could she not see what he saw as surely as anything else? How had these visions grown only more _clear_ with time? 

“No, I believe you have enough burdens without my adding to them,” the Exarch finally said, slowly. The steady drop of her blood echoed in the room.

As if a spell broke, she was whole and alive again, wearing a sad frown at his decline.

He sighed his relief. “Nevertheless… thank you.”

“Of course,” she murmured.

_Will she ever leave me? Even when I die for her? Would that be enough?_

Somehow, he doubted it would be.

He thought he might tell her later, when she found him dozing by the Kholusia cliffside. It was the first time he had slept in over a year—he would have delayed it longer, if he could have—but the Tower would have its retribution regardless of his wants.

He did not remember his dreams, but her face when he awoke was the picture of his worst nightmares incarnate. 

“Exarch?” she asked gently. 

She spoke to him with an open maw lined with a thousand razors, blood and spittle dripping from her tongue in long, stringy ropes. Her eyes were the blackest of pits, holding nothing and everything, emptiness and the cosmos at once. She was a blaze of gilded finery and ivory, and he would go willingly to his death if she so asked.

A last semblance of sanity begged him to spend a moment considering the rationale of the situation. He shook his head, blinking furiously to clear away the haze.

The Warrior leans forward with wide, concerned eyes. Normal and Spoken once more, the inevitable delayed for a few more moments. 

“Forgive me,” he breathed.

_Forgive me, for I saw that which would happen if I falter in my duty._

He saw it again, hazy on the edges, when she retched Light incarnate before him, her body wracked in incomprehensible pain as she threatened to turn. His arm trembled as he held his staff, the last frayed edges of his sanity threatening to snap. He could not fail, he could not waver… She was folded over, her body wrenching with pain, pain he could take, he _had_ to take…

And then she calls his name.

His _true_ name.

A name forgotten to all…

… save for her.

Godsdamn the dreams, the nightmares, the hallucinations. He would save her, he would defy the thousands of visions he’d been cursed with and rewrite history, defy time itself. No matter the suffering, no matter the grisly circumstances of death which awaited him, it was worth it. Because _she_ would—

He heard the shot before he felt it.

The wild clap split the very air itself, and he had but a moment to consider before the pain set in.

Raha had never been shot before, and had no frame of reference for the pain. A strange numbness spread over his insides, before a white hot lancinating pain swept through him, and then the ground was coming up to meet him, the acrid taste of blood on his tongue…

He did not realize what exactly happened until he woke in Emet-Selch’s chambers.

She asked him, far later, after Hades was slaughtered, after the world returned to its rightful form, after he bared his face to his people for the first time, what happened between he and Emet-Selch. She said it gently, infinitely kind, laying a gentle hand on his. Her eyes pleaded with him to give in, to let her share his burdens.

What could he possibly tell her? What words did he possess that could encapsulate what he had suffered? Should she even be forced to bear such pain, when she herself shouldered so much, much he himself did not know the breadth of?

If he had felt pity for Emet-Selch before, for the Ascians, for the plight of their lost, blighted star, it evaporated in what occurred between them in the depths of Amaurot.

Emet-Selch was single-minded and unwavering in his torture, and he wielded cruelty with the same casual flourish he did with everything else. He had little interest in torturing Raha physically. “You and I are beyond such things,” he told him with a grin, the stench of nightshade about him. Raha laid bound and panting on the fine marble floors, the pain in his belly growing worse and worse with each breath. It was torture in itself; he would either struggle for breath or feel each breath like the gunshot all over again. “You do not seem the sort to give up your secrets under pain alone. So…”

Emet-Selch wrenched his fingers in the damp tangle of Raha’s hair, lifting his head up to look upon him. “… I will take what I require of you by force,” he promised. 

It was an obliteration all its own, to have one’s mind flayed open.

Dissected like a child’s experiment, each vulnerable part cast aside with little care or concern. Emet-Selch chose efficiency over precision, rummaging through Raha’s mind heedless of the damage wrought.

He screamed til his voice became a frayed crack, clawed at his binds til his wrists wrenched in agony, bit his tongue til blood welled over in his mouth, grateful for the distraction from the inferno ripping through his mind.

Every worst memory was opened, turned over, cast aside, and Raha relived every moment with brutal clarity. Nero commanding him to _remember_ in the World of Darkness, the Warrior’s last sad smile as he turned away from her, Iseux’s miserable, unfair death in Master Matoya’s cave, and every horrible, gruesome death he caused and witnessed in the First. His failures, numerous and uncountable, laid upon the scales for Raha to see, and they were tipped to one side. All these and more Emet-Selch sought through, lingering to chuckle on some of Raha’s more humiliating moments.

One such kernel caught his interest.

Fifty years ago, halfway through his time on the First, in the dark chambers of his sanctuary. He had borne witness to an especially horrifying hallucination—the Warrior’s body was wrapped in a stiff white sheet on the floor, blood seeping through the fabric in a black puddle, growing ever wider with the steady flow. The body was a formless lump, and his mind conjured a hundred different horrors for what lay beneath that cover.

And worst of all, she lived still, destroyed though she was. 

_“Raha,”_ she pleaded, _“Raha, I want… I can’t live like this, Raha…”_

He had buried his head in his hands and sobbed, the helpless tears of a tormented child.

“Hallucinations.” Emet-Selch’s voice ripped him back into reality. Raha rolled onto his side and retched, an empty, fruitless motion, only succeeding in causing fresh waves of pain from the bullet in his gut. Snot dribbled down his face as he spat blood and bile on the gleaming floors. “Pray what fractured your mind so? I had forgotten what the Spoken psyche could wrought under duress.”

“Has the Unsundered Ascian mind evolved beyond such trivialities?” Raha summoned what anger he could in his voice, craning his neck to wipe his face on his robes.

“Oh, quite,” Emet-Selch quipped. “True, we have our own difficulties to work through, but they are much, much more complex than simple hallucinations… however…”

Emet-Selch fell quiet, an architect's smile on his face, and Raha had never known such fear. 

“If I… Ah, that should do it,” he purred.

And then, Raha was no longer there.

Instead, he was in the Warrior of Light’s room in the Pendants.

Sunlight filtered in from the open window, fresh-picked Lakeland lavender set on the nightstand. His basket of sandwiches was on the table, plates laid out for two. Of course—she had invited him here, after all. He smoothed his robes down, ran his hand through his hair—it would be strange, dining with her while she saw his full face, and he was excited at the prospect, eager to spend time with her, a luxury he had not been afforded in all their time together.

“Raha.”

It was more snarl than sound, a broken, thready rasp, and then he saw that which had been there all along.

The Warrior of Light.

She was precisely as he remembered from the beach, but her body was contorted, wrenching in the throes of transformation. Wings exploded from her back, ripping through her very flesh in their haste, and her hands twisted into claws each the size of his wrist, blood-tipped and razor-fine. The room was too small for her, it could not possibly contain the awful beauty of her form. The bizarre notion to fall to his knees takes him, but the complete terror sweeping through him drives him to the floor regardless.

She was Norvrandt’s last Lightwarden.

He had utterly and completely failed in his duty. His duty to Garlond Ironworks, to the First, to the Source, to _her._

And before she consumed this doomed world, she would start with him.

He could never run from her. Not in his nightmares, his visions, and not now.

She was on him in an instant, leaping onto him in a great flurry of feathers. Her claws wrapped around his crystal arm, clenched, and it fractured into a rain of shards, splitting him to the bone. He reeled back with the pain, roaring as her other hand pinioned his Spoken arm into place, claws ripping through the muscle and tendons, rendering them inextricable.

“Raha,” she whispered. Tenderly.

Pityingly.

Her head dipped down to his abdomen. Her maw opened, drool falling on him in heavy drops. He flinched away from her, whimpered as his arm twinged fruitlessly against the razors of her claws. 

He had wondered, what this would feel like. The Exarch had borne witness to soldiers devoured and torn apart far too many times.

Perhaps he had always known this was to be his fate.

She ripped into him heedless of his robes in one smooth snick of her jaws. With another bite, she is rending him open, parting flesh and crystal like silk, and he was forced to watch in a state of detached shock as she ripped into his organs, her mouth soaked scarlet with his blood. She looked up at him with his flesh and gore in her mouth with something resembling a smile.

“Raha.”

The Warrior’s hand on his grew insistent. She leaned forward to peer at him, eyes wide with concern. “Are you alright? You’ve gone very pale.”

He settled his other hand over hers, anchoring himself in her presence. He could hear children playing in the Exedra, the tell-tale shuffle of chainmail as Crystarium guards made his rounds.

“Nothing worth remembering,” he assured her.

* * *

It was passing strange, to be the man who had everything.

Relieved of his duties of the Crystarium—he left Norvrandt behind in a blur of bittersweet pain, willing himself perpetually _forward_ lest he balk from the task ahead—and back in his own world, in his own _body._ Mind and body coalesced into something homogeneous, and he woke in a daze to her tears on his face, “Wake up, Raha, _wake up,”_ and a wicked crick in his neck.

She took him home, kept him stable and upright as they picked their way through Mor Dhona, as she had ever done all this time. Doted on him with a tenderness he’d never seen in her as they sipped Tataru’s tea. The Warrior recounted how she’d taken his crystal through Norvrandt, all the happy goodbyes along the way. He made her recall every last word of Lyna’s final parting, the pain of losing his granddaughter sweeping through him as he began to believe he was truly _here._

They stayed up into the small hours of the morning, and she dozed on his shoulder, relaxed, at peace, the two of them safe at last in their homeland after so much hardship.

She jerked awake, kicking a chair in her rush to wake. “You need to sleep,” she commanded, as if more to herself than him.

Sleep. How long had it been, since he’d slept? _Truly_ slept?

The Warrior was stable and whole before him, but he did not trust his mind not to flay him anew.

“I don’t think I can,” he whispered. They were alone in the Rising Stones, the rest of the Scions having retired to their quarters. If he would express such a thing to her, he would not have others overhear. 

“Let me give you a sleeping draught. Tataru keeps them in stock, since insomnia's part of the job description at this point.”

He didn’t want it. But because she insisted, he took it. So Raha slept an uneasy, dreamless sleep, waking every other bell. So certain he would wake up back on the First. So certain if he closed his eyes again, she would be dying before him once more. But nothing so strange happened, and he found himself at breakfast with the Scions, wondering at the small miracle of sleep.

And for a while, there were no horrors for him. That first moon back on the Source moved in a delightful, joyful blur, and he found himself dreading sleep not because of what lay in the dark, but because he didn’t want these pleasant days to end. The Scions embraced him in a way they had never with the Exarch, the healing properties of being _home_ fusing them all together. Even wry Y’shtola let down her guard, pulling him into her research and fixing him with some rather direct questions on his intentions with their dear friend.

And through it all, the Warrior scarcely left his side. “I promised you a journey,” she would tell him as she informed him of their next adventure, “and godsdamnit, you’re getting one, Raha.”

And he certainly did.

She seemed determined to show him every square malm of land he had missed in his time asleep in the Tower, and everything beyond he had never ventured to see. Ishgard welcomed them like heroes from ancient myth, for Ser Aymeric de Borel eagerly awaited their arrival. He pulled the story of Norvrandt out of each of them over the course of two bottles of fine wine, talking themselves hoarse into the late hours of the night. They left flowers at Ser Haurchefant’s grave, and he was grateful to be the one to wrap his arms around her when she wavered. She took him across the Ruby Sea to Doma, a culture he had only ever read of, never experienced. The Liberator of Ala Mhigo, they called her. The fires of Ghimlyt Dark burned still, but it did not fill him with the dread he felt before. It was, as much as he had ever asked for, the adventure he'd wanted. 

And yet…

There was an emptiness to him. It permeated his entire world, leached the enjoyment and life out of all he did, all he saw. Smiles became forced, words rang hollow in his mouth. If he had discarded the persona of the Exarch, he found himself now forced to don a new one. That of the Scion G’raha Tia, cheerful and alert, happy to be alive and at his Warrior's side.

And it disturbed him beyond reckoning.

How could he possibly feel sorrow, when he had everything he could have ever thought to ask for? The Exarch would have—and _did_ —risk everything for the mere _chance_ at such a life, and here Raha was, struggling to return the Warrior’s easy smiles, forcing himself out of his bed every morning, finding himself hazy and exhausted. 

“You were asleep for much longer than the others,” she told him when she caught him grimacing as he struggled to catch up with her in training, “so be patient with yourself.”

“I’m younger than _you_ now,” he quipped. “I have no excuses, Warrior.”

Her eyes narrowed at him. “Raha,” she said warningly.

He brushed her off with a laugh, forcing it on his features, sprinting ahead of her. And so it was forgotten.

But that night, for the first time since he'd returned home, his nightmares reemerged.

They were old haunts, familiar territory. If their surroundings were new, the content was well-worn territory. Her screams of agony, her pleas to finish her off. The states of decay as her corpse melted in his arms. The old helplessness seeping into every ilm of his being, Emet-Selch waiting in the wings.

But unlike his nightmares in the Tower, where none save the ghosts of Allagan emperors would hear his whimpers, the Rising Stones was a small place. 

He woke to the Warrior shaking him, her face a vision of concern and worry.

“Twelve forfend,” she gasped, “what in the hells happened to you?!”

He croaked her name, a broken, pitiful sound.

And Raha pulled her into his arms, heedless of anything save for the primordial urge to touch, to be _held._

He sobbed into her belly as she settled against him, smoothing his sweat-soaked hair and folded down ears with cool, steady hands. He held her like she might be torn away if he did not hold tight, as if he closed his eyes he would be locked in a hellscape in which he could not save her.

“You’re safe,” she whispered, “nothing can harm you, Raha, I’m here.”

He wanted to tell her he wasn’t worried about himself. He had only ever worried for her. But he cannot find the words, for there are none sufficient, instead burying his face deeper into her soft tunic, taking deep, steadying breaths of the warm scent of her.

She tried to pull it out of him that night. Cradled his tear-streaked face, sweeping her thumbs across his ruddy cheeks and assured him his secrets—as they had ever been—would be safe with her. Whatever horrors he had faced, she would be happy to share his burden.

He could not tell her.

It was enough, that she was here, that she cared enough to cradle him so. She offered to stay the night with him and he refused. “I would not rob your sleep,” he sniffed, struggling to regain his dignity.

“You are robbing me of nothing,” she frowned.

But he pushed her away, and kind as she was, she respected his request for space. 

Even if he regretted doing so.

He started forsaking sleep again, going through all sorts of motions to trick the Scions into thinking everything was still normal. He was a poor liar, but such falsehoods were surely benign; they did not need to know all of his plights, and it was far from the first time Raha had foregone sleep. He was more used to being sleep deprived than not.

But whereas in the Eighth Umbral Era adrenaline had proved an excellent stimulant, and in the First he relied upon the Tower for the energy his body lacked, Raha had neither. His body fought against his mind in a perpetual tug-of-war, and he went to more and more drastic measures to stay awake. Stripping naked in his quarters with the windows wide open, shivering over an open book. Taking sips of stimulant potions. Resting with his chair tipped over, so he would wake if it slammed down. 

And for a moment, he thought himself infallible.

That was, until he fell asleep, fork in hand, during lunch with Alisaie, Krile, and the Warrior.

Alisaie had laughed at him, calling him an old man. Krile made a quip about his old study habits from the Studium, but the Warrior had said nothing, her face expressionless and unreadable. She peered at him over her tea, the stone of guilt turning over in his belly.

He thought he might escape her. Perhaps she would toe that boundary he had set that first night. But she was waiting for him in his quarters, perched on his bed with a book in hand, expectant and gentle. 

“My friend,” he smiled, forcing himself to stay casual, “I believe you are in the wrong room.”

“And I believe you have been lying to me again.” She sighed, but there was no bite to her words. “Raha, have you not been sleeping?”

“I—“

She ran her hand over the bedsheets, perfectly made with crisp edges. “This doesn’t look as if anyone’s slept in it. And Tataru said you’ve been awake before even her every morning.”

His ears folded down, tail hanging limp. The disappointment in her voice stung like nothing else. Her expression softened, and she beckoned him with a hand.

“I’m not mad,” she assured. “Raha, I’m worried for you.”

No, he had never been able to run from her.

He took her hand, and she pulled him onto the bed, lacing her fingers in his. He watched as she ran her thumb across his knuckles, the stiff tendons, slow and implacable.

She was waiting.

Waiting for him.

“I don’t know where to begin,” he whispered.

“Begin anywhere,” she told him. “We’ll figure it out as we go along.”

He found himself starting at the beginning. Iseux’s death, and the painful knowledge of what Black Rose did to a person—what it had done to _her._ He spoke in a remote voice, piecing through the fragments of his horror, struggling to lace them into a cohesive narrative. It was as if someone other than himself was telling his story, and perhaps that was the only way to trick his mind into letting him say such things.

“I thought it would end, once you arrived. Once I had proof that I would succeed in my endeavors,” he rasped, “but instead… instead I… I saw _you._ When you would speak to me, sometimes… you were not yourself.”

“I was dead.”

He nodded, and somehow _her_ expressing it made it feel more real, more comprehensible. “Dead or mutilated—or worse, a Lightwarden.”

He spared her the worst of his experience with Emet-Selch, and perhaps she saw something on his face that told what he could not vocalize, for she pulled him fully into her arms, tucking his head beneath her chin. He was too grateful to feel embarrassed, the tiny muscles which had tensed in his body for a century melting in her arms.

“Since I arrived in the Source with you,” he told her, closing his eyes as he heard the gentle rhythm of her heart, “I have… felt despondent. Like something in me is broken, and it cannot be repaired. I am not what I was. I feel like the most ungrateful lout for not being able to be… _present_ with you. You’ve done so much for me, gone out of your way to make me feel at home, and I’ve had to force every smile, _convince_ myself that I was happy.”

“And you feel like you have nothing to be upset about,” she murmured, “like _you’re_ the terrible person for being sorrowful when the world is right again.”

“Yes,” he breathed.

“It’s not your fault,” she soothed, “you’ve gone through unimaginable hardship, and you haven’t had time to be vulnerable, to _process_ any of it.”

“You speak as if you’ve… experienced this. Have you…?”

She made a soft laugh, pulled him tighter. “Yes. Gods, yes. The ghosts of those we could not save haunt us all—and they certainly haunt me. And when all is right in the world, when all is silent, that is when they are loudest. When they demand to be seen and heard. It is a lesson I have had to learn time and time again.”

“I don’t know how to heal from this,” he confessed. So quiet none save her would hear it.

“Slowly,” she whispered. “One day at a time. But, you have to allow yourself to feel the pain. Feeling guilty for suffering does nothing except compound it. And…” she ruffled his hair teasingly. “Raha, you have to learn how to sleep.”

His ears flattened, and she laughed, a sweet, kind sound.

“I do not wish to overstep your boundaries, but would it help, if I stayed—?”

 _“Yes.”_ It was out of his mouth before he could stop it, and he cringed at the plaintive sound. “I… I do not wish to put my own wellbeing upon you... but if you are willing... I would not turn you away Far from it.”

“I’m willing,” she murmured. “I want to help—it is no burden to me. At least, it is not a burden I would not gladly bear.”

He brewed lavender tea as she leafed through his books, and he obediently downed a sleeping draught as she turned down his bedsheets. There was no sound save for the gentle rhythm of her breathing as he dozed in her arms, the previous nights' terrors in the very back of his mind.

_Do not close your eyes. You cannot. You cannot sleep._

But he trusted her. And so, he let himself sleep, surrendered himself over.

And when he woke from his deep, dreamless rest, it was not into a world in of desolation, of depravity, of his worst fears materialized, or failures or strife.

He woke to her soft smile, to the promise of wounds beginning to heal, and the knowledge that they, no matter what had happened or would, were safe in this moment.

And that she would not abandon him. 

**Author's Note:**

> This fic was inspired by this incredible [comic](https://twitter.com/pleasebemine00/status/1329065735713214464?s=20), please give them lots of love.  
> Thank you so much for reading. I know a lot of you were expecting something very different from me, and I'm very grateful to any who read this. I was in kind of a rut with my longfic, and this was incredibly therapeutic to write. I think this is the most personal thing I've published here. I love horror, and I wanted to explore some darker aspects of the game and work through some of my own mental stuff. So thank you for letting me do that.  
> [my carrd.](https://thepapernautilus.carrd.co/)  
> 


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